12.04.10
Can you make a living shooting landscapes and gardens?
There are few subjects that enthusiast photographers like to photograph more than landscapes and gardens, many with the dream of one day turning their hobby into a career. But how realistic is the idea of making a living in these areas? We asked two of the country’s leading photographers in each field to tell us.
David Ward Landscape Photographer
David is a hugely experienced and widely recognised professional landscape photographer who has photographed everything from huskies to Ferraris, but landscape has always been his passion. As well as working as a photographer, he leads photographic workshops for the landscape tuition company Light & Land. He has written two books: Landscape Within, a philosophical look at photography in 2004, and Landscape Beyond in 2008.
He writes:
There are two ways in which you can make money as a landscape photographer. The first is a high art route such as that taken by photographers like Simon Norfolk, Michael McKenna or Andreas Gursky who make money from print sales. Unfortunately, the chances of making a living in this way are very slim indeed. The second route would be through stock sales, but since the emergence of Getty and Corbis, which completely dominate that market, it has become more or less impossible to make a good living from stock sales of landscape images. I know from speaking to other landscape photographers that it was possible to make 80% of your income from stock sales five or 10 years ago and 20% from other areas, but that has now completely reversed and the amount of income has been severely reduced.
There are probably fewer than half a dozen photographers making a living purely from landscape photography in the UK today, and I’m not one of them. I make my money from teaching and writing. Someone extremely established like Colin Prior makes his money from product such as postcards and calendars, as does Joe Cornish, but it requires considerable investment and is not a way to make money in the short term.
I don’t shoot any commissioned work now, and when I did it was usually to shoot people within the landscape, because that’s what people wanted. Pure landscape images have always been my passion, but they have always been a separate body of work. It wasn’t work I earned a living from, but having published some books and having some of the work appear in magazines, I acquired a small following of people interested in my photography, which allowed me to put myself forward as a teacher, which would not have been easy or even possible without that initial interest in me.
There are a number of photographers who are highly acclaimed by fellow landscape photographers and enthusiasts, but they do not seem to be known in the wider world of commercial professional photography. Why? I guess it’s because our concerns are very different from those of the majority of commercial photographers, who are photographers as a career choice not because they are passionate about their subject, which I suppose is a very controversial thing to say, but let me expand on this. The main purpose of the majority of landscape is to be illustrative rather than thought provoking or evocative, and I would say the same is true of the majority of commercial work produced. That’s not true of the very best in any field, but that is work that is only going to be produced by the very top 2% or 5% of photographers. I think it’s unrealistic to expect to be able to make a living as a landscape photographer, but not impossible. A lot of people who shoot landscapes do it as a very personal form of aide-mémoire.
‘I was in this place, I liked the light and this is what I saw, and I enjoyed myself.’ That has a pretty narrow focus of interest. For it to move beyond that, it needs to have some form of philosophical framework. Simon Norfolk’s work has this. I didn’t become a landscape photographer because I thought I would make a fortune; I became a landscape photographer because I was intellectually and emotionally motivated to do so. However, a lot of people become portrait photographers because they see it as a career path. Part of the problem for professional landscape photographers is that, even a brief scan of the web will reveal thousands of landscape images, most of which are not particularly interesting or inspiring. As well as this, you have enthusiast photographers selling their prints from their websites for £25, and it completely devalues everything. As a result, people aren’t willing to pay more for something better, and because of the amount of images, they can no longer tell what a good photograph is. A lot of people miss the point with landscape photography. Technique should only be harnessed to improve the way an image evokes a response, but people misuse technique to apply a gloss. But this is not only the case with over and under saturation of colour and in the use of HDI software, it’s also true of the subject with an assumption that the only way of looking at a landscape is as a vista. Landscape photography is too often formulaic, concentrating on light and ignoring the importance of the passing of time within an image.
Generally, landscape is used in the commercial world as an illustration. The only place it is seriously used to explore the visual world and our relationship with the natural world is the art world. It is in this environment that big money can be made. If it’s a living from shooting landscapes you’re after, start looking at selling postcards and calendars of your work.
www.into-the-light.com
Jason Ingram Garden Photographer
Jason Ingram is based in Bristol and travels widely, photographing gardens, plants, food and people for magazines, books and design groups. He also works in collaboration with gardeners Monty Don, Carol Klein and Joe Swift on regular magazine features as well as providing stills for the BBC’s Gardeners’ World television series.
He writes:
The key problem with making a living as a garden photographer is there are just not that many people who require the images. However, despite the rise of the mega stock agency, the specialist garden market for stock images seems to have survived. This is due to the fact that gardening and horticultural-based publications will have very specific demands for an image, and the only place they will be able to find that will be with a specialist library such as GAP Photos and the Garden Picture Library, which has now been swallowed up by photolibrary.com. They cover everything from specific plant images to step-by-step images of how to lay a patio.
I think that, as with landscape photography, there are only a handful of photographers who are making a living solely from garden photography, and there are definitely a considerable number who will not consider taking on commissions. The reason for this unwillingness to accept commissions is that a commissioned garden shoot requires a lot more than just shooting the plants. You will also be expected to shoot portraits of the gardeners or owners of the garden, which I consider to be very much part of being a garden photographer, but it is not a skill that comes easily to many plant photographers. I’m just as likely to be shooting a plant profile as working in the studio shooting art-directed portraits of television garden presenters.
Gardening and landscape both have the same amateur/enthusiast element to them, in that the subject matter for both is so accessible. So they are obvious areas for them to choose to photograph. They are also both areas where that audience has a wealth of training courses to choose from. I don’t teach on a regular basis, but I am teaching on a limited number of days this year, for the first time, at the Royal Photographic Society. It’s vital in garden photography that you not only have photographic knowledge and expertise, but also horticultural knowledge. You need to know your way around a garden, about growth sequences, companion plants and how to light a garden.
However, there are a few established garden photographers such as Clive Nichols who do make a living outside the totally commissioned world. He recently produced prints on canvas that are being sold through Next Interiors, he does mugs for John Lewis – he’s highly commercial. Whereas another very established photographer, Jerry Harpur, works mainly in book publishing and in syndicating his images.
My advice to someone who only wants to shoot plants would be to look at the long-term aim of supplying a specialist stock agency and expect it to take up to five years to have submitted and had accepted between 5,000 and 10,000 images to get to a point where they could realistically expect to make any income. But it’s important to not throw images at a general library and instead take time to get accepted by a specialist agency that will always have a demand for their stock.
www.jasoningram.co.uk
www.gapphotos.com
Conclusion
So is it possible to earn a living shooting gardens? The answer seems to be a yes with conditions if you’re willing to accept commissions that involve shooting more than just plants. Yes, if you’re not willing to compromise on subject matter but are willing to devote up to five years building a specialist body of work for syndication. With landscape photography, the answer does not appear to be as positive. The market for work is so limited that the best advice seems to be to keep it as a hobby, unless you are willing to promote yourself within the contemporary art market or teach and write. The general advice for both forms of subject matter seems to be similar to that for any genre in today’s commercial climate: provide a client with more than one reason to work with you and you have more chance of working.
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